These complementary environments also fostered the development of specialized skills. The availability of great deposits of iron ore in the Samia hills prompted its settlers to specialize as blacksmiths, peddling their skills across the region. The Banyore, located in the well-watered hills of Bunyore, were recognized as rainmakers and consulted as experts throughout the region. The sharing of professionals and specialists across clans traced a regional network that further encouraged cultural exchange. In border regions, many informants pointed to the adoption of place names and linguistic features from their Kalenjin neighbors. The Tiriki adopted Kalenjin age-set names, arguably one of the defining features of male-community membership.35 The Tiriki, frequently at war with their Logoli neighbors in the nineteenth century, often allied with Nandi clans.36 The adoption of Kalenjin age-set names may have allowed young men to identify allies in warfare despite linguistic and cultural divisions. The relative practice of circumcision, both male and female, among these groups also attested to complex historical exchanges. The practice of circumcision varied greatly despite contemporary popular beliefs that all Bantu communities in this region practiced male circumcision, in contrast to their uncircumcised Luo neighbors, but not female circumcision, in contrast to their Kalenjin and Maasai neighbors. Early European explorers noted the falsity of such common beliefs, recording a variety of practices ranging from elaborate male circumcision ceremonies to the absence of any form of circumcision.37 These exchanges of experts and customary practices blurred the environmental and social lines seemingly dividing these groups. Ideas of community and production were not confined in this era by notions of enclosed ethnic communities but rather grew out of geographic interdependence, pragmatic comparative work, and strategic cultural borrowing.
OF CLANS AND TRIBES: TERRITORY, AUTHORITY, AND BELONGING
It was this “slippery ground,” this environment of rich diversity, interdependence, and fluidity that, in the words of one proverb, did not “recognize kings.”38 Alongside lessons in agronomy and social interdependence, this environment taught its first settlers to develop independent small-scale polities characterized by heterarchy, unique languages of political and social organization, and distinct cultural practices in land and authority.
Precolonial studies of eastern African societies often emphasized the flexibility of local identities as necessary for “establishing relative positions on the cognitive map of expanding frontier societies.”39 Early oral historians pinpointed the clan as the most stable and fruitful source of historical information and genealogical periodization: unlike the “invented” tribes of 1970s historians, clans were “out there,” in the words of Jan Vansina.40 Recent scholarship has criticized these evolutionary and lineage-based models and has begun to interrogate the moral and intellectual organization of precolonial African communities. In their classic study on the Luo identity in Siaya, David Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo argued that “friendship fortifies kinship,” a challenge to mainstream anthropology that treats kinship as “an enclosed autonomous locus of structure.”41 In her study of the Bagisu, close relatives of the Bukusu on the Ugandan side of Mount Elgon, Suzette Heald demonstrated that segmentary lineage systems and descent-based kinship ideologies were not inherently at odds with the practices of territoriality or creative reformulations of kinship.42 Less the basic and innate structure of community envisioned by colonial administrators and European anthropologists, clans were the historical products of imaginative social work and provided a locus of belonging amid multiple shared sites of identification and interaction.
Among those who settled northeast of Lake Victoria, the clan was often the largest and most constant source of identification and support. The clan acted as a unit of agency, a tool in the management of social relations that offered cognitive structure to mappings of community and territory.43 Clans were often a heterogeneous mixture of families and small groupings linked together by common ancestry, common migration, or common settlement. However, the terms of membership and size of the clan were as flexible as the new environments in which they settled required. Exogamy, the practice of marrying outside the clan, and patrilineal descent underlined the gendered nature of community membership. Wagner found that “each tribal community (particularly its male half) derives its ‘group consciousness’ first and foremost from the belief that all or the large majority of its constituent clans have descended in an agnatic line from a mythical tribal ancestor.”44 However, as earlier alluded, the primacy of descent and ancestral myths proved more illusory than this unqualified assertion.
As with partisan histories of migrations, the nomenclature of “clan” and “tribe” represented terms of imagined political communities continually contested and reworked within larger cultural projects. Some larger “tribal” associations of clans, such as the Wanga, the Logoli, and the Bukusu, did emerge in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but these communities were the products of the same imaginative work as clan communities on a larger scale. For the purposes of this study, these “tribal” names suggest not articulated structures of political authority but rather larger communities of clans that were recast in the colonial era to defend precolonial autonomy.
Beyond changing ethnonyms and constraining lineage-based models of kinship, the basis of clan formations in western Kenya relied on the ability of the group to effectively settle and civilize new ecological niches. Neil Kodesh has argued that the variety of terminology for clan structures in the Great Lakes region, including ubwoko in Kinyarwanda, kika in Luganda, and ruganda in Lunyoro, suggests that “the ideology and practices of clanship developed along different lines in various settings within the region.”45 Among the Bantu communities of this compact area, terms for clan organization varied from oluhia and olugongo to ibula and ehiri.46 These terms reflected not only varying forms of political organization but also the varied environments that constrained as well as sheltered.
Environmental conditions taught these inhabitants lessons in how to structure political and social relations. Ecological niches prompted the development of specialized economic production and skills that fostered distinct communal identities. Some, like the larger groups of the Tiriki and the Bukusu, became frontier communities as they settled on steep hills and beside rich forests that offered opportunities for expansion.47 The expanding Bukusu promoted strong military leadership (in the figure of the Omugasa), built fortified, walled villages into the landscape, and transformed territorial msambwa ancestral spirits into “ancestral ghosts,” akin to those in Buganda, so that they could inhabit the caves and springs of their new territories.48 Throughout eastern Africa, msambwa sites on the edges of settlements provided important sacred spaces linking the “health of the land” to the health of residents and their descendants.49 Living on the imagined edge of this landscape, these frontiersmen would pose distinct problems for both colonial officials and ethnic architects seeking to territorialize ethnic identity.
Others, such as the southern clans of the Bahayo, Banyore, Batsotso, and Idakho settled into pockets isolated by hills and ridges and well suited for intensive agriculture. Among these more dispersed settlements, patriarchal clan heads and councils of elders provided only symbolic leadership linked to their ability to amass material and human wealth and maintain peaceful relations.50 Among the large but scattered clans of the Logoli, the weng’oma, or “one of the drum,” would beat a drum across the hills to gather clan heads together in times of war.51 Early anthropologists such as Wagner viewed these systems of political authority as “inarticulate,” not “linked up with clearly defined rights and privileges, such as usually